Because some people will do *anything* for a badge.

Rock it like a hurricane…

I just finished another game of Dungeons of Dredmor, which is possibly my favourite rogue-like to come out since ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery, which is still arguably one of the best in the genre). I was starting to feel confident that this was going to be the game where I managed to get the badges for completing the game, completing the game with permadeath, completing the game with a random skills build, and being awesome in other, more generalized ways. It didn’t happen. I died.

If you’re not familiar with rogue-likes, this tends to happen. A lot. All the time, really. It can get a little frustrating, but somehow, with Dungeons of Dredmor, it really doesn’t lose its appeal (the game, not the dying).

This time, I managed to get further in the game than I ever had before (level 17? 18?), which was getting pretty encouraging. This was due to a combination of Archaeology (the second skill in the Archaeology tree lets you send artifacts to the museum, in exchange for experience proportional to their worth/rarity) and Big Game Hunter, which gives you trophies (read: extra XP) every time you kill an Animal-type animal (like a Blink Batty or a Deep Fungus Diggle). Between those two skills, I cranked out the experience, and managed to max out two of my skill trees:

Egyptian Magic

and Battle Geology

To be honest, I don’t feel like Battle Geology did all that much for me. Yeah, it offered me a nice ranged attack, and Quake does some decent AoE damage, and– best of all– they don’t use any mana, but I feel that I could have taken another warrior-type skill and maybe gotten more from it. I don’t know that I’d pick it again in a custom build.

Egyptian Magic is nice, though. You cast glyphs on yourself, and they do all manner of different things. The more glyphs you have, the more ridiculously awesome you are. The kicker is that they all have a maintanance cost in mana every so many turns (10 for the first level, 8 for the second, 3 for the last one), which means that if you’ve got them all on, you’re burning some serious mana. Now, if you’ve got some mana regen action going on, this isn’t going to be a problem at all. I’ll definitely try this out again later when I’ve got a character with more mana coming in– someone with blood magic, maybe. That would make for a really nice combo.

Also, in the midst of wandering around and maxing skill trees, I also managed to complete a Wizardland for the first time, something that I’d been unable to do before the latest patch, as it seemed that the enemies there were always much, much stronger than I was. I clearly didn’t have that problem this time: